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How I Started Birding

How I Became a Birder

Anything that flew or crawled was always a source of fascination for me. Things had to have a name, and as a child my reading matter of choice had many big pictures of animals, birds and insects. One time I was extremely embarrassed by Peter, a kid who lived across the street. After I told him that deer lost their horns every year he said “Deer don’t have horns, they have antlers!” That was a crushing blow to my self esteem—the pain lingers even now.

It is hard to remember how I developed a passion for birds. Perhaps it is the freedom that they enjoy over us earthbound creatures. Of course, their beauty, color, variety, and their accessibility make them fun to study. Listing birds is somewhat analogous to collecting stamps, satisfying some atavistic hunting instinct. The quest for new species adds adventure to any trip, no matter what the purpose, and also causes one to visit some unusual places. Swamps, landfills and sewage treatment facilities rank high on birders’ “must see” locations.

Nowadays I see my grandchildren naming the various species of dinosaur just as I learned to name the birds. While knowing the names of birds provides intellectual satisfaction, it also excites greater curiosity about similarities and differences between the kinds of birds, not only in their color, size and shape, but also in their habits, manner of flying, their habitats, patterns of coming and going, and the marvels of their survival.

Birders have an undeserved reputation as eccentrics. At least, I think it is undeserved, for I share their passion, and (of course) I am very mainline and normal! There are sports nuts, compulsive stamp and beer bottle collectors, golf and bridge addicts, and yet it seems that “old ladies in tennis shoes” who happen to sport a pair of binoculars and who get up early to look into treetops, oblivious to curious stares, suffer public deprecation. Certainly, that was Mary Lou’s view. The last thing she would think of doing was to go out and actually look for birds.

My maternal grandmother, “Sweetheart,” (I gave Ella that name because that is what she always called me) probably instilled some interest by throwing bread out for the “chippies,” as she called the English Sparrows (their proper name in those days). Then there was “Jenny” the wren who occupied one of the bird houses on the trellis. I do not know how Sweetheart came by that name, but later I found a wren named Jenny in one of Thornton Burgess’s Bedtime Stories books.

I collected bird pictures from Arm & Hammer Baking Soda boxes. My first “real” bird book was a small format book by Chester A. Reed, Land Birds East of the Rockies (Doubleday, Page & Company, 1923). There was a picture of a different bird on each page with descriptive text next to it. As I identified each bird in the book, I penciled across its picture in big block letters: “SAW.” That book was assigned to the trash heap long ago, but I recently found another copy.

Another book that I really enjoyed was Birds of the South, (by Charlotte Hilton Green, published by UNC Press in 1933, almost a year before Roger Tory Peterson's first Field Guide) which was given to me by Lou Fink, a family friend and scout leader who authored a bird watching column in the local newspaper, The Rutherford Republican. Its end papers sport some of my drawings, including a Star-nosed Mole and a deer, and show my address as 164 Springfield and telephone number “Rutherford-2-7392-M,” indicating that I was less than 8 years old when I defaced it. I did continue to use it, checking off the table of contents for each species seen. I remember longing to see a Mockingbird, unknown in the northeastern states at that time. Mockingbirds would later expand their range and become quite common even up into New England.

Birds of the South included a table on which the reader could enter bird sightings. I entered only one: “English Sparrow, August 29, in the garden eating weed seeds.” I did not keep a more serious list until I was 13 years old and in pursuit of a Boy Scout merit badge. This list began in the dead of winter, 1948, and reflected a zeal for observing and recording that has continued unabated for 65+ years to a present total of 589 US and Canadian species, plus a couple hundred more seen on my few trips to Hawaii and Latin America.

“Birding is a fascinating, exciting, challenging game. It requires and encourages ever-growing skill. It may involve us in great adventures and wide travel, sometimes in difficult terrain. Seeking new birds to check off on our life lists may draw us further into the lives of these birds, challenging us to learn more about their life cycles, their behaviors, and ecology; and as our ecological perspectives expand, we may be stimulated to become more involved in conservation work, to protect the habitats of the many species we enjoy.” (Burton S. Guttman, Birding, February 2004)

1 comment:

I'm a very impatient artist. But while looking for information about birds for a project, I came across this blog. Your stories are so fun to read and had me engaged for over an hour now.Love your dedication, your interest and your writing. :)C. Noel (Atlanta)

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About Me

Virtual New Mexican, winters in Florida and migrates annually to Illinois, remembers growing up, birding and practicing in New Jersey, finds birds and beauty close to home.
A lifelong birder and retired physician, I grew up and began my practice in New Jersey. After my career in the US Public Health Service, my wife Mary Lou and I retired to the mountains of New Mexico, where we led bird walks at Rio Grande Nature Center and the US Forest Service. The cooperative rosy-finch feeding project we initiated at Sandia Crest has developed into a major banding and research program. More recently we moved to South Florida, where we worked to create a Bald Eagle sanctuary to protect this species' first active nest in Broward County since before DDT was banned. We migrate to a second home in northern Illinois. I took up photography in 2008 and enjoy finding beauty in birds and nature close to home. Read
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